By Claire W. Gilbert
The oil well fires in Kuwait are out. But there remain an untold number of wells which are still spewing raw crude onto the desert floor into lakes, pools and rivers of oil.
There are 200 lakes of oil, from as large as one mile long to a possible eight miles long, and from two to four feet to up to eight feet in depth. Pumping operations have not yet moved quickly in this arena.
There is a danger that some of this oil will find its way into the Persian Gulf. Brent Blackwelder, acting president of Friends of the Earth, said that over 7 billion gallons are on the desert floor in these lakes. That is by far the biggest oil spill that has ever occurred on land. If my subsequent arithmetic is correct, it is equivalent to 666 Exxon Valdez spills!
Six to 8 million barrels of oil poured into the Persian Gulf. A proportion of it has evaporated (into the atmosphere), and private interests from Saudi Arabia may have removed as much as 2 million barrels from the water, and they are still working on it.
Some of the crude is no longer liquid but in tar balls. However, coastal areas of seven or eight countries are covered with crude up to a mile inland, and some of these areas are now dead, including the mangroves and other vegetation, fish spawning ground and all other animal life.
The original firefighting consisted of four or five teams from the US and Canada. The contract to supervise the rebuilding of Kuwait and the extinction of the fires was given to a US giant, Bechtel Corp, before war's end. After war's end, a group in Maine, the Wellfires Network, published a newsletter and encouraged people to put pressure on President Bush and Congress to get the fires out more rapidly. Some people credit the Wellfires Network with the fact that subsequently a large number of firefighting groups were brought in from many countries of the world to fight the fires.
Original estimates of how long it would take to extinguish the fires ranged from one year to 10 years. Yet, the fires were put out even more rapidly than the extremely ambitious goal of one year. How was this possible?
Many factors were publicly given credit. One was the fact that so many teams were brought in. Yet individual fires used to take weeks to extinguish (or months if the well head was gone and a new well had to be drilled crosswise into the old one to get it under control), and once the new teams were brought in, it appeared the fires were being "snuffed out" as if they were large candles.
A second factor given credit was the fact that pipelines were being used to bring in large quantities of water. Yet, plans to pipe in large quantities of water were factored into the original estimates of how long it would take to put out the wells.
A third factor was "experience".
Fourth was that new technology evolved which made snuffing out these fires a relative cinch.
A fifth factor was not publicly mentioned. It is most probably the true reason that the fires were so easily "brought under control". The underground water and the gases began to escape with the burning oil. (Actually, some wells were self-extinguishing and had to be relit until they could be capped in order to keep lakes of oil from forming.
An uncontrolled well spews forth far more oil than a regulated well. Casings of unregulated wells are under greater pressure, and large cracks and fissures developed in them and their surroundings. Some of the sand had turned to glass from the heat. Apparently the underground structures were compromised and several precipitous drops in oil pressure occurred over time, making the fires considerably smaller. This information comes from the firefighters themselves.
As the wells were capped, the pressure began to climb again. To wit, the last two burning wells (other than the ceremonial well which was to extinguished by Kuwait's emir) resisted strenuous attempts at extinction for several weeks.
The significance of the loss of pressure in the wells is not immediately apparent. A frequently quoted figures is that in the oil fields there is a ratio of 300 parts gas to one part of oil. According to informed sources, this gas is methane. There may have been the biggest spike of methane gas going into the atmosphere in the history of the world, caused by gas escaping from the oil fields, which caused the drop in pressure in the wells. Methane is implicated in the destruction of the ozone layer.
Some critical statistics were hardly noticed by the mass media. One is that the amount of particles put into the atmosphere by the fires was equal to that of all of the automobiles in use in the world. Also, spikes of soot were found over Hawaii, Japan and midwestern US. Sooty snow fell in the Himalayan Mountains in north India. Large amounts of soot have fallen into water supplies in the Gulf region, possibly causing intestinal upsets.
Crops have been interfered with in countries downwind of the fires. Respiratory illnesses, of course, increased. But many other more subtle illnesses result from oil smoke. Animals killed for food were found to have black lungs. The extent of damage to the environment locally, regionally and globally is really unknown at present. The amount of illness caused from petrochemicals in the air is also unknown at present.
The findings of the Friends of the Earth International were under-reported in the media. The FOEI team flew over Kuwait and downwind of the oil fires at approximately the same time as the US inter-agency team of scientists (who are widely quoted in the media). FOEI noted a smoke plume of 18,500 ft., considerably higher than the 6000 or 8000 ft. figure more widely quoted. This is important to the debate as to how much oil fire effluent is in the stratosphere.
On the day FOEI were to hold their press conference, the
EPA, representing the inter-agency team, announced a press conference to be held shortly before, and deftly upstaged FOEI. Whereas the leading scientists who were part of the inter-agency team provided statements that only a "few molecules of smoke" went into hemispheric circulation, the implications of the FOEI team could lead to other conclusions because they observed that different constituents of the smoke were taking different trajectories, moving out in ribbon-like formations at higher altitudes than the other team was reporting. They also noted that the further downwind from the fires these were observed, the greater was the height of the smoke. The inter-agency team did not fly as far downwind as the FOEI team.
[From Blazing Tattles, a monthly newsletter about the oil well fires and their implications.]